Furloughs, weather snarling air traffic

Air travelers in and out of Washington, New York, Boston and Charlotte began feeling the effects of the sequester on Monday, as flight delays and cancellations crept into the nation’s flight schedules a day after the FAA started to furlough air traffic controllers.

The delays aren’t yet the all-out breakdown in air travel that critics of the sequester have been predicting. And much of Monday’s turmoil was caused by bad weather in New York, where high winds were delaying flights into and out of LaGuardia by up to an hour and 45 minutes. Other weather events caused long delays at airports in Miami and Denver.

Story Continued Below

Still, as the evening ticked toward 6 p.m., furlough delays started cropping up at Los Angeles International, which was estimating arrival delays of just under two hours.

The FAA said earlier that the furloughs had caused about 400 delays across the country on Sunday, the first day of the staffing cuts. It said the furloughs were contributing to snarls at several major airports on Monday, partly because controllers had to keep planes farther apart to safely manage the flights with reduced staff.

"Controllers will space planes farther apart so they can manage traffic with current staff, which will lead to delays at airports," the FAA said in a statement Monday. It warned that "travelers can expect to see a wide range of delays that will change throughout the day depending on staffing and weather issues."

Staffing “challenges” have emerged at larger air traffic control facilities such as the ones serving the New York, Dallas-Fort Worth, Jacksonville and Los Angeles areas, as well as the air traffic radar serving the New York region.

By Monday evening airlines had canceled 34 flights bound for JFK, which was hampered by construction delays. Airlines also canceled 23 flights to Denver, 21 to LaGuardia, 17 to Washington Reagan National, 15 to Newark Liberty, and six to Charlotte. Some media outlets were reporting delays of up to three hours Sunday night at Los Angeles International, where unions blamed a combination of furloughs and bad weather.

The vast majority of airports on the FAA’s flight-delay map were showing green early Monday afternoon — reflecting normal conditions with delays of 15 minutes or less. At Washington Dulles International Airport, wait times at TSA checkpoints were no more than 14 minutes around 1 p.m. Monday.

But Doug Church of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said the woes are "likely not a coincidence."

"This is the unique and unusual circumstance that controllers and the FAA now find themselves in,” Church said. “It's no way to run the world's most complex system. It's terribly and needlessly disruptive and frustrating.”